The declaration of June 21 as International Day of Yoga by UNESCO is one of the more creditable achievements of Narendra Modi‘s otherwise underwhelming government.

While more and more Indians are now embracing Yoga, it can be argued that the last four years has seen India become a more raucous, angry and irritable country, far from the calm and peace Yoga is to bring its practitioners.

Yoga is supposed to make its practitioners calmer and peaceful, and restrain their mind through mental and physical discipline. Has the growing practice of yoga made Indians a better people? #InternationalYogaDay2018

“The Yoga school broadly accepts the worldview of the Sankhya [of a cosmic duality to the universe] but fleshes out the physical discipline and meditational regimen required by an individual to realise the separation (kaivalya) of Purusha, pure-consciousness, from the non-sentient Prakriti.

“The Yoga Sutra is attributed to Patanjali and is dated to sometime before 400 CE. Several scholars believe it to be of much greater antiquity, and it is very likely that even if composed later, the Sutra codifies a tradition and practice from several centuries earlier.

“This restraint, it believes, can be brought about by discipline, both physical and mental.

“In the sutra, discipline is outlined as an eightfold path, starting from yama (self-restraint), niyama (virtuous observances), asana (posture), pranayama (consciously controlling breath), pratyahara (withdrawal of the senses), dharana (concentrating the mind), dhyana (meditation), and samadhi (a trance-like state in which there is complete union with the subject of meditation).

“Yoga literally translates to ‘union’, and the purpose of the entire regimen of the eightfold path is to prepare the disciple for this union with Purusha.

“Unlike the Vedantic system, which believes that enlightenment, based on jnana, can come to anybody at any time through direct anubhav or communion, Yoga provides to Sankhya a carefully structured complementary system of mental and physical exercises that it believes is a pre-condition to moksha.

“On one essential point, however, Yoga differs from Sankhya, and that is in its acceptance of a personal god, who directs the cyclical evolution process from creation to dissolution.”

One comment

The note on yoga by Churumuri is valuable and useful and interesting and informative and reflectibe . Yoga has been converted in to a gas and fashion diluting the core values
The comments of churumuri is appreciated
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